Internet connectivity is essential to the functioning of any business, and municipalities are no exception. Municipalities around the world are using Internet connectivity to operate more efficiently and improve service delivery to their communities, and require the same levels of stable bandwidth as any other organisation.
One South African municipality needed to link multiple offices together to transport voice and data over these links, providing improved communication and efficiency. Partnering with specialist telecommunications installer IP Solutions, the municipality has reduced its costs and enhanced its connectivity through the installation of a Radwin 5000 Point-to-Multipoint wireless network solution.
IP Solutions’ Noah Mashaba explains that the network has brought a big change into the municipality’s working environment and saved it money.
“The municipality had multiple ADSL lines, and each one was being billed separately. This was impractical in terms of both cost and efficiency, particularly since it had the need to link its offices. Our installation allowed the municipality to upgrade the main office ADSL and all other offices now share the bandwidth.”
The Radwin 5000 base stations are optimised for corporate access, video transmission and backhaul applications and were the ideal solution for this installation.
“With Radwin 5000, customers gain the advantages of a robust, high-capacity solution with improved spectrum efficiency and better tower utilization for overall lower total cost of ownership. This is the perfect solution for the high capacity demands of bandwidth-hungry customers,” adds Riandi van Niekerk, marketing manager at Miro, an official distributor of Radwin products in South Africa.
The choice of the Radwin 5000 was made based on its features, says Mashaba, as the municipality evaluated a number of other products and felt that the Radwin solution best met its needs.
With its small form factor, the Radwin 5000 offers up to 250Mbps per base station sector and a long range of up to 40km. IP Solutions installed three units, which more than adequately cover the customer’s communication requirements.
“We decided to use the Radwin 5000 for a number of reasons,” says Mashaba. “It was the most cost-effective option, and easy to install. I upgraded the firmware on all devices to make sure it was the latest version, created a link on the ground, and we were ready to go. The client is so happy with the results that they are looking at expanding the links to other offices and we are currently doing surveys on these locations.”